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siliconbits writes "At CeBIT 2011, we went around the stands from some of the biggest component manufacturers in the world and asked them a simple question, would you consider bringing out ARM products (barebones, laptops, tablets, motherboards) for Windows 8? The answer was a unanimous yes; like Microsoft, the same firms that have been faithful Intel and AMD partners for years are prepared to explore other territories as soon as Windows 8 will go live."

How are they going to explain to the million of Windows users that no application they know will work on ARM Windows? It's the same as with Windows 64 bit and why we didn't saw much of it despite the prices for RAM are very low. I guess with Windows 7 the developers finally released some software for 64 bit. That's what, like 9 to 10 years since AMD came with the amd64 architecture?

Well, at least I can then finally buy some ARM notebooks and put a decent Linux distribution on it.

RISC won 20 years ago, all x86 processors decode to some internal instruction set. I am certain the engineers at Intel and AMD have tested exposing the native instructions and if it could perform much faster than x86 I'm sure they'd enable applications to bypass the hardware decoder and send micro-ops directly. While they still process the instructions the really obscure ones live in microcode instead of hardware, x86_64 adjusted the number of registers etc. so most things have been tweaked. I don't need to remind you that the last attempt to do better was the Itanic...

What did you expect them to say - "No, we won't - we'll cede that market to our competitors, because our customers prefer products with crappy battery life"?

Parent is correct... and for even more reasons than indicated. (no, this next section is not a slam against MS... read through the whole thing) Sure, Win8 may bomb on such things (pick a reason: no interest, Microsoft yet again not fulfilling their promise to have something actually suitable for such devices, Win8's requirements being too absurd for such "minimalist" hardware, whatever)... but the simple fact is, it may gain traction and take off. On that possibility, there isn't one OEM with half a brain that would say "no, we aren't doing this" at this point in time. When the correct time comes to make a decision, they'll choose to (a) release some test bed units, (b) dive full in or (c) look away from Win8 and concentrate on other things - but now is definitely not them time for them to say no, especially under the possibility that they will need Microsoft's good will in the future (assuming Win8 proves suitable and desired on such devices).